I came into this project with a pretty strong notion of what a fighting gameshould be. I’m used to having two characters facing off playing idle animationswith weapons held out front. Each attack then consists of a wind up, a cut anda recover. The game becomes one of recognizing frames of animations andreacting appropriately - player A presses button to attack, player B pressesbutton to respond; results all come down to timings encoded in the animationsthemselves. This has provided endless hours of fun.

With CLANG, we want to support fighting styles that have not yet beenimplemented or perhaps even imagined. This means we cannot simply encodeanimations with typical cancel windows, priorities, etc. Instead, we areletting arbitration fall to physics. This allows us to do lots of neat stufflike making the location you get hit important, knocking off armor pieces, etc.,but ultimately it creates an even playing field for all manner of futuretechniques.

It also turns out that holding your sword out in front of you in a typicalfighter game idle stance makes it real easy for your opponent to snipe yourhands causing you to drop your sword. In real life, if you have to wind up foryour attack, you’re already dead!

The first fighting style we are tackling is Fiore’s longsword, which identifiesseveral stances or “guards” where you’re basically already wound up to attack. A typical starting point is with the sword up over your shoulder like you’rewinding up to swing a bat, but there are others where you start with the swordlow and pointed at the ground to swing up like a golf club. In the story-game,we will have trainers (think Ra’s al Ghul or Obi-wan) that you’ll have to travelto learn and unlock these guards and their associated set of attacks for aspecific fighting style.

However, what this all does for the game, is instead of exchanging button pressfor button press, combat becomes more of a dance; it becomes strategic. PlayerA settles into a guard, player B adopts a good defensive guard in response. Player B shifts around to the left requiring player A to shift stances. PlayerB takes this opportunity to attack.

In a typical fighter, you start with three basic attacks: low punch, high punchand kick (or some similar set), and the explosion of complexity comes fromchaining one attack to another (often modified by movement). When we switchaway from the gamepad to motion controls, we leave behind its limited set offace buttons opening up the physical space around us for selecting guards (wehave seven that we’ve started with). From most guards, you can perform a low,medium or high attack, but through the magic of animation blending and inversekinematics you can perform anything in between as well - discrete attacks becomecontinuous analog motion. If you want to get extra fancy, perform a “reverso”attack behind your head and down the other side.

But this is just the opening salvo. The complexity explosion instead happenswhen sword connects with sword. Fiore calls this “incrosada” - the crossing ofthe swords. From here, there are many options based on the physics of thesituation - mostly involving who has leverage over whom (where the swords aretouching relative to each other, if swords connected to your left vs your right,etc.). Options include stuff like grabbing the sword with your (gauntleted)off-hand, and doing some crazy arm-bar maneuver that I’ve never been able tofollow, but results in the other dude dropping their sword. We might get tothis, but in the initial tech demo we are only providing three basic options: apommel strike to the face, a cover and cut, and the most typical response: asimple thrust to the face/chest. These are all triggered and controlled using acombination of movement and hydra input.

Hopefully this gives you a little bit better idea of the direction we are takingthings. It’s easy to look at what we have right now and only see it as asimulator. We’re starting from grounded techniques that we know work in orderto support a common playground rooted in physics for disparate fighting stylesto interoperate. We feel we need to get this right before layering on the moretraditional trappings of a game, but our ultimate goal still is to craft a funand compelling experience to share with all of you.

You have failed to fulfill your obligation of "a thank you credit on our website and within the game." and a "Download of the game".

The fact that the "download" provided is labeled "DEMO" does not support the claim that this is the intended reward. The fact that the "DEMO" is able to be downloaded without a "backer login" supports that this is NOT our "Download of the game" reward.

With a "Survey sent: 7/14/2012" (via Kickstarter) and my survey: "Submitted: on July 15 2012." (via Kickstarter) and an "Estimated delivery: Feb 2013" (via Kickstarter).As of 2014-09-03 EST, my pledge has not been fulfilled and I ask for a full and immediate refund.